Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
features.apmreports.org
There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an expose of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

I finally started to listen to “Sold a Story”, then in a panic reviewed how my school system is teaching children to read.

While listening to episode 2, “The Idea”, I learned that many students were taught how to read with the skills that are certain to make them poor readers. (This made me reflect on the recent news that a great many Americans don’t read at the 6th grade level.)

I hope that you all check what your school district is doing, and like me find that the school district is following a good plan. (Minnesota requires the reading plans for school districts to be made public. I read the plan, and then I ran it through Gemini to check against “sold a story” as this is not my area of expertise.)

As an aside many reading program have suspiciously terrible names, like “Read Naturally”. While the google I use found the main site quickly, criticisms of that program are harder to locate. (There are many criticisms of other programs that use the phrase “read naturally”.)

  • mmhmm@lemmy.ml
    2·
    19 hours ago

    Journalists are taught to write at a fifth grade reading level, generally. Seems like the average might have improved

    I agree with the point, reading education isnt prioritized in any meaningful way

    • MNByChoice@midwest.socialOP
      1·
      14 hours ago

      reading education isnt prioritized in any meaningful way

      Sorry, the point is not that it is not prioritized. Reading was very much prioritized.

      The point is that a mistaken idea and its resulting training curriculum were introduced and championed as a way to improve reading. This mistaken training curriculum had the effect of *reducing reading ability.

      The intention was to teach weak readers the skills used by strong readers. Instead they trained unskilled readers with the skills used by weak readers. The impacts took a while to become obvious and sometimes well intentioned people are wrong.